Jamie LendinoLG Octane (Verizon Wireless)The LG Octane continues the earlier enV3's tradition with versatile screens, great keyboards, and a solid mix of apps, but the Octane isn't as good a voice phone and the UI feels stale.

The LG Octane continues the earlier enV3's tradition with versatile screens, great keyboards, and a solid mix of apps, but the Octane isn't as good a voice phone and the UI feels stale.

The new LG Octane holds down the midrange core of Verizon's feature phone lineup. It's a worthy successor to the popular LG enV3 (3.5 stars). The Octane offers solid construction and an excellent pair of keypads for frequent texters and voice callers. It's not as good a voice phone as earlier enV models, though, and the dated UI doesn't do it any favors, either. The Octane still feels like a quality phone, but it's clear that the enV series' star is fading.

Design and Call Quality
The Octane measures 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.5 ounces. It's made of a mixture of matte and chrome accented plastics, and looks and feels heftier than it actually is. A much-improved 1.8-inch, 220-by-176-pixel TFT display sits on the outside of the phone. It's bright and colorful, and looks nicer than the typical, dim, passive-matrix, external LCDs older phones have. Inside, there's a 2.6-inch, 320-by-240-pixel display that looks sharp and colorful. Dialing numbers is simple on the precise numeric keypad, and the typing experience on the modestly revised QWERTY keyboard is excellent.

A few glitches mar the design, though. The front panel screen lock came on instantly; I'd cue up a track and then attempt to change the volume, only to discover that the screen had locked. I also continue to find the enV series' design confusing, with its multiple internal and external menus, and constantly changing button positions as you open and close the device. But this is a personal thing; other people love the enV for its flexibility.

The Octane is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Verizon phones are known for their voice quality, but the Octane doesn't offer much here. Voice timbre was crisp, bright, and tinny through the earpiece. Callers said I sounded like I was on a speakerphone for part of the time, and one call degenerated into static in an area with normally strong Verizon coverage. During another attempt, persistent echoes made it tough to carry on a conversation.

Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. The voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth, but the app had some trouble recognizing spoken numbers. The speakerphone was loud and full, though you have to open the handset to use it just like on the older enVs; when you do that, the hinge covers the volume buttons. Battery life was excellent at just over 7 hours of talk time.

Apps, Messaging, and Multimedia
The Octane offers a good mix of apps. VZ Navigator 5.1 offers Networks-In-Motion-powered GPS voice directions, plus the app's usual, nifty real-time event and weather updates on the home page. There's a dedicated Bing search icon in the main menu; searches ran quickly and delivered useful results. The unbranded HTML Web browser is unintuitive; it cues up by pressing Left on the control pad, which is confusing, and you must press Menu to go to a URL. It was also slow to render pages, but the screen and performance were sufficient for WAP sites.

The free Social Beat app hooks into Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace accounts. It's sluggish to install and set up, but offers an easy interface that switches between the three services and a dedicated stream page that aggregates recent status updates. It works, but the UI is cramped; only one tweet displays at a time on the Twitter page, for example. Text messages are threaded now. The IM app supports AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo accounts, but not Google Talk. Verizon's low-quality mobile e-mail app costs $5 per month extra; at least it now combines Web and Exchange e-mail. Thankfully, the Octane doesn't require a data plan the way the enV3 did, so you can save some money if you don't need these features.

The non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack limits you to cheap, poor-sounding, third-party earbuds. My 32GB SanDisk microSD card worked fine in the side-mounted slot; there's also 64MB of free internal memory. You have plenty of music options, as the Octane offers a USB mass storage mode and syncs with Rhapsody, although the latter's $2-per-track pricing is outrageous. MP3 tracks sounded clear through Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. But there was a 3-second delay between when I adjusted the volume and when I heard the adjustment.

V CAST Videos offers a wide selection but frustratingly low quality. Streamed videos were smooth but pixelated in full screen mode, and the audio fell out of sync within moments. The internal stereo speakers added oomph to the presentationalbeit with no basswhile the flip design makes the Octane perfect for watching video on a desk or kitchen table. Standalone 3GP video files played smoothly in full screen mode, but MP4, WMV and AVI were out. I expected a little better.

Camera and Conclusions
The 3.2-megapixel auto-focus camera includes an LED flash. Test photos were colorful and well balanced both indoors and out. Fine tree branches and a brick patio looked good, and there wasn't too much noise in dimmer indoor rooms. It's still no replacement for a standalone point-and-shoot, but it's better than most low-end phones. Recorded 320-by-240-pixel videos were well lit and played smoothly at 14 frames per second.

Despite the Octane's roomy QWERTY keyboard, I'd probably choose a phone with better voice call performance. The LG Cosmos (Free, 3 stars) and the Samsung Intensity II (Free, 3 stars) both fit the bill, though neither are as good with multimedia as the Octane.

Finally, these last two recommendations make me laugh, but I'll explain: take a serious look at the Microsoft Kin One and Two, now sold as the Kin ONEm and Kin TWOm. Now that Verizon resurrected them as texting phones and priced them as such, instead of as overpriced, crippled smartphones, the Kin One and Two make plenty of sense with their slick UI, usable keyboards, and compact form factors.

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also been published in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision, as well as...
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